Another dissatisfied Wells Fargo customer who was stonewalled. This for an error they made on a small loan which affected my credit rating. When I did some research about my type of complaint I found many much more egregious ones .
I despise them because of the dishonest way they handled the whole situation.
I hope some day you fail to read every last little clause in the fine print of something that may have changed after you signed up for it and they come for your liver.
How they screw you:
They post numerous debit transactions to your account that were authorized… No big deal… That’s what they are supposed to do… But then the next day they show available balance and it include some $$$ they took out the day before --thus inflating available balance… So if at any point you use that money they will over draft your account for $35 for each transaction-- even if you only use the money for a second-- such as transferring to another account-- even if you never show a negative balance.
So with Wellfargo you need to know they show no loyalty they are scumbags.
What some have done to pay back wellsfargo is:
Going bankrupt in near future?? they borrow $$$ from wellsfargo!! Don’t screw over a local bank that doesn’t screw you!!
some people set up a new business (in NJ it only costs $125) and use their debit cards-- wellsfargo will lie to you about your available balance in an attempt to rack up numerous $35 charges-- but spend these savvy customers charge big charges ie: $5000 or $10,000 on debit cards-- when wellsfargo plays their little game and temporarily increase their available balances- these customers take their $$$ out and wellsfargo’s and bam!! Make up all the money wellsfargo screwed them out of in the previous couple years!! Wellsfargo can’t go after principles of business because of limited liability aspect of corporations.
I don’t suggest anyone do this!! I’m just reporting the news !
And if no one else said it today… FUCK Wellsfargo! Greasy greedy bastards!
First of all, many thanks to Svenbuck for resurrecting this zombie. I just have a sinking feeling that this may be the most useful thing you do during your tenure here.
Welcome to the SDMB, by the way. I really hope you make me eat those words some day. 
ANYHOODLES:
Didn’t Wells Fargo start out as the Overland Stagecoach Company? Their predecessor should have been something like the Pony Express, shouldn’t it?
The predecessor I was talking about was Northwestern National Bank, i.e. BanCo, i.e. Norwest Corporation.
They started growing during the Hoover Depression, when they began buying up troubled local banks. In 1998 they took over Wells Fargo, but decided to operate under that name instead of Norwest, because it was non-regional and because their surveys said it was more well known. Unfortunately, they later discovered it was well known for the kind of stories in this thread. It did have a national reputation – but a bad one! By then, it was too late to change the decision on the name.
I am a current customer, and in ruthless fairness I have no complaint. Used to bank at one of those “mousetrap” places, became accustomed to associating the smell of cheese with death and danger.
But WF will e-mail me if a charge to my card or whatever might put me in overdraft mode, with sufficient time to get to the bank and head it off. My previous bank would have been on it like a starving dog on a porkchop. I understand that is at least partly a matter of regulation, but that “go the extra mile” e-mail impresses me.
I’ve just said something comparatively nice about a bank. I need to lie down. Or do some drugs. Both, maybe.
Regardless of whether Wells Fargo is evil, to not have account alerts set up especially for accounts you aren’t going to pay attention to is kind of dumb.
I have a Wells Fargo savings account that is just a rainy day thing and I don’t really ever expect money to come out of it. So I have an alert set up for it to email if any withdrawal is made from that account.
As Chase where I do more of my banking (and which does have a better selection of alerts available) I have alerts set up to email me if large transaction hits my checking account and others that text me if the accounts fall below a certain threshold.
I can ignore all of these accounts if either of them start dicking me with some new fee I’ll know about it because they’ll tell me.
Some idiot at Bank of America entered in my daughter’s savings account as a regular account. I put $250 in there. Those fuckers took $15 a month from my child for three months until I finally got them to stop after three in person visits and four phone calls. Banks have to be watched very carefully like toddlers.
Because this is in the pit, I’m going to take this opportunity to say that you are possibly one of the most annoying and useless posters here. The majority of your comments are neither witty nor cute nor relevant and despite the hurr durr vibe of the thread at hand, everything you add, everywhere, seems to derail the conversation. I am not sure how you’ve managed to avoid the hand-slapping mods about staying on topic, because really–you are like some circus dog that feels the need to make its presence known, regardless of how stupid your contribution.
And yes I know this is off topic. And yes I know I should probably make another thread. But really, do a search of eludicator’s posts and tell me that he stays on topic more than 1/20 posts.
ETA: I love WF because they are very pro-same sex marriage. I will continue to use them if only for that.
I pit myself, for not leaving Bank of America even though their service is mediocre and their fees are astronomical, because I’m too lazy. That said, I did get an Amazon/Chase credit card last year and start using it for all my purchases. Yay points!
I just had a crazy new idea for online banking. Banks, feel free to use this.
Okay, no one writes checks anymore, right? Well, sort of; we write maybe one or two a month, and we use the debit cards for everything else. But there are some things that you have to write checks for, such as the check we wrote recently to the Department of State to get a passport. And there’s not much point in using the little check register, because you never really know exactly what your balance is to “subtract” from. When we need to know what our bank balance is, we don’t look at the register, we jump into online banking on our cell phones.
So, how about this: for those rare occasions where you write a check, allow customers to create a “holding area” and transfer the amount of the check into it. When the check is finally presented to the bank, the bank can take the money out of that “holding area” to pay for it. That way, money to cover the check is already withdrawn from the account, so when you use the mobile app to check your balance, you can see what your real balance is, and you don’t have to be ever-mindful of the amount of the outstanding check. And if you forget to put money in the holding area, they just take the money out of the checking account as normal; the temporary area is just a way to keep your available balance accurate.
Seems like it would cost banks little to implement and would be a great help to customers. Then again, they might lose income from overdraft fees from people forgetting about outstanding checks and overdrawing their accounts, so they’ll probably never do it. Still, just a thought.
[QUOTE=living_in_hell]
I love WF because they are very pro-same sex marriage. I will continue to use them if only for that.
[/QUOTE]
Best in the country for LGBT, up from #2 last year, actually. Not to mention a long string of perfect scores from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index.
I have an even crazier idea: Why don’t you quit expecting your bank to be your babysitter and take some responsibility for your own finances once.
Props to you for making WF’s stance on SSM your mitigating factor.
That said, you are so very wrong about many things. For instance, about the importance of any individual poster “staying on topic.” As for luci, if I were to be forced to spend an afternoon doing nothing except searching for and reading his posts, I suspect I would be having a very PLEASANT afternoon.
I apologize for being eight months late, but welcome to the SDMB. I hope that one day I will open a thread bearing your name as “most recent poster” with as much happy anticipation as I do when they bear his.
Debit cards are plastic checks. If you can’t be bothered to record every ‘check’ you write in the register, it’s not really anyone else’s fault if your balance is inaccurate.
I have a checking and a savings account at wells fargo. I keep thinking I should swap to a credit union but Wells Fargo atms are everywhere. I used to go with their paper billing program and it was a total crapshoot as to whether I’d get a statement each month.
We recently got fed up with Wells Fargo’s antics as well. We had a mortgage with them for a couple of years, during which time they continuously tried to sell us additional services that would be tacked onto our monthly payments. One thing they really pushed hard was a home warranty with American Home Shield, not the most reputable company and likely would have covered hardly anything we own due to age and/or state of repair. Lately, WF had been trying to get us to sign a homeowners insurance policy with a company they recommended, WF even sent us the paperwork. Hey, WF, we had a homeowners insurance policy, which got cancelled because you didn’t pay them out of our escrow account like you’re supposed to! Now you want us to sign with these people? How do we know you’ll remember to pay them?
We just refinanced our mortgage with someone else, saving a couple hundred bucks a month.
Congratulations on coming to that conclusion after just eight months. As a riposte, you’re on your own there. I think elucidator is one of the board’s most entertaining posters and your dislike for him speaks poorly about you. Actually, disliking him is entirely your prerogative. Making a public statement to that effect really indemnifies your character.
Or to put it in elucidator speak: don’t need to read his posts, hoss. You’ll get over it.
Wow, the douchiest possible answer, didn’t even take long. Where did I say I wanted the bank to babysit me? My idea was for a tool to allow me to have more control over my own finances. Your response is like saying, “Just do the math in your head, dumbass!” to someone before check registers were invented. And that’s basically what the “holding area” idea would be: an electronic form of the check register.
Why not just use the check register or even a spreadsheet. Why should the bank have to provide a solution to what is your problem?
Paper ledgers. How quaint. Meanwhile, the rest of us are living in the modern world and are carrying powerful portable computers in our pockets that can query the bank for real-time account balances. Max is just noting the usefulness of a tool that would allow you to offset that balance to account for one of the rare paper cheques someone might still need to write.